600,000 killed by Bush's war in Iraq

[Kuciwalker]

Though it makes a fine metric for failure.

That sounds really witty until you read it a second time and realize it's meaningless.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Ramo
You mean, police state.

So they have a lot of organized political violence from a bunch of different sources instead of much less from one. Freedom

Not that I suffer the delusion we have brought any sort of glorious freedom to the Iraqis

[Straybow]

Tingkai, they weren't clerks. Not that it makes much difference.

Assigning one third of the deaths to the soldiers quickly reaches statistics that render the projections absurd. For every soldier who didn't kill anybody, then somebody else killed more. You end up with the troops on active patrols responsible for scores of deaths each.

However you divide them among the troops you have to come up with an astonishing 200/day. Don't forget that only a small number of actual militants are active. To say soldiers have killed 20,000 would be far above estimates, and that only accounts for a tenth of the attributed deaths.

Now you have to explain how we've managed to rack up a ten to one collateral damage rate and all the embedded reporters and at-large news crews somehow don't notice the piles of bodies. Ten to one!

So, either the press is even more incompetent than the military (as the critics claim), or the figures are out of proportion.

The solution that requires the least embellishment of the facts is to doubt the projections, and the assignment of responsibility arising from the projections.

[Tingkai]

Less than 160 people per day killed by coalition forces, an average that would include the invasion period. That's a actually a small and believable number, given the 100,000+ U.S. forces there and the amount of firepower available to them.

Why is it not being reported? Almost all reporters are based in Baghdad, due to the threat posed by insurgents and by coalition forces (who have "accidentally" killed a number of reporters). So a lot of the violence is not seen.

When U.S. troops come under fire, they respond with massive firepower, firepower that may often be area fire and they may not know the damage they have done.

I saw one BBC story where a patrol comes under fire, and returns fire in a crowded street. The patrol moves on in pursuit of the rebels, never noticing the dead civilians left behind.

And the U.S. government doesn't want to know the body count. The boys in Washington are happy being ignorant. Facts are inconvienant

[Sikander]

Originally posted by dannubis


A few posts later than that I already said that also France and Germany were involved in that one.

But that does not mean we didn't provide him with the capabaility to gass the Kurds no ? So technically no, it was not US gas, it was only made by components he got from the US, France and Germany. Big deal.

So if I stab you with a knife made from steel made from ore mined in Congo you'd blame Congo rather than me right? Or you'd blame me first and mention Congo as a co-conspirator? Or you'd only do so in order to pi$$ off a Congolese?

How about doing this in order to not look like such a tool? Whenever you feel the urge to repeat what you know to be bogus propoganda in order to score some points in an inane internet dick measuring contest, instead use something that's actually factual. There are literally millions of actual facts that cannot be easily disputed with which to humiliate your unseen rivals on the internet. Unless of course you are into humiliation, in which case carry on.

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


Kuci's valid point is that that we cannot know that they would be alive today. We can speculate that most of them probably would, however.

No but the beauty of statistics is that we don't need to know which individuals would be alive today. We can estimate how many of them there are total.

That sounds really witty until you read it a second time and realize it's meaningless.

Right, see for awhile I forgot that Iraqi lives were worthless

So if I stab you with a knife made from steel made from ore mined in Congo you'd blame Congo rather than me right? Or you'd blame me first and mention Congo as a co-conspirator? Or you'd only do so in order to pi$$ off a Congolese?

But if you were engaged in selling AK-47s to poor African countries in a state of civil war are you totally innocent?

However you divide them among the troops you have to come up with an astonishing 200/day

You don't believe that 1 in 600 or so of the US soldiers kills someone daily on average? 200/day makes it sound so big.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Victor Galis


The size of the country is irrelevant really. Once you get a sample size of about 1,000, as long as that sample does not have any selection biases, it's good enough.

That's like assuming that you can somehow instantly and reliably find a large group of people who aren't gay. Even the Republicans in Congress can't get that done. What you are actually saying is that despite the fact that virtually every poll is flawed significantly, they somehow manage to produce results that aren't 180 degrees wrong most of the time.

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Sikander


That's like assuming that you can somehow instantly and reliably find a large group of people who aren't gay. Even the Republicans in Congress can't get that done. What you are actually saying is that despite the fact that virtually every poll is flawed significantly, they somehow manage to produce results that aren't 180 degrees wrong most of the time.

I don't think you understand exactly what an unbiased sample is. It just has to be random in such a way that specific groups of people aren't more likely to be excluded than others. In the past picking random names from a phone book was good enough (today enough people lack a landline).

[Sikander]

The numbers attributed to direct coalition military action are what make me seriously doubt the whole enterprise. If you take them seriously it means that we are killing Iraqis at a greater rate than we killed Vietnamese (per troop on the ground). That despite vastly better fire discipline (noted in innumerable press accounts of combat actions), despite the fact that the vast majority of our artillery units have been converted into infantry, despite the fact that we are dropping less than 1% of the bomb tonnage that we used in Vietnam, despite the fact that there are extremely few actions in which enemy forces number more than a platoon etc.

There are no saturation bombings with B-52s wingtip to wingtip unloading full loads of 750 lb bombs, no free fire zones, no batallion sized combat actions, no huge firebases constantly firing H & I missions, and apparantly no eye witness reports that could possibly substantiate these sorts of numbers. How the hell did they manage to come up with these numbers?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Victor Galis

I don't think you understand exactly what an unbiased sample is. It just has to be random in such a way that specific groups of people aren't more likely to be excluded than others. In the past picking random names from a phone book was good enough (today enough people lack a landline).

It's easier I'm sure in a Western country where we keep copious records, have a regular census etc. Iraq hasn't had a census in well over a decade, and hasn't had a government that has been in control of more than 70% of the country in more than a decade. There are no decent baselines to work from here in order to decide whether your sample is unbiased or not. People cannot safely move from place to place in Iraq whatever their affiliation these days, and as you note telephone registrations are not reliable for sampling a population. So how could they obtain a suitably representative sample when no one has any idea what one should look like? Even if they were able to pick people more or less randomly, they'd need many, many more of them to achieve an equal degree of accuracy. The study / poll would in effect have to establish some sort of reasonable baseline as its primary function, something I think is impossible for any group at the moment.


Take a look at the deeply flawed statistical reports compiled with Iraqi government help on the effects of sanctions etc. during the pre-war period. They were readily willing to blame the horrific pre-Iraq War status on bombing done during the Gulf War. One has to assume because it fit their pre-concieved notions. It's since become abundantly clear that Saddam hardly spent a shekel on infrastructure since coming to power in 1979, and was selectively starving / ignoring various sectors of the population in terms of public services in order to punish / weaken those he considered a threat to his regime. This had been going on long before the Gulf War btw and was a regular feature of government policy to which Anfal and other miltary campaigns against various sectors of the civilian populace were merely exclamation points.

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Sikander
The numbers attributed to direct coalition military action are what make me seriously doubt the whole enterprise. If you take them seriously it means that we are killing Iraqis at a greater rate than we killed Vietnamese (per troop on the ground). That despite vastly better fire discipline (noted in innumerable press accounts of combat actions), despite the fact that the vast majority of our artillery units have been converted into infantry, despite the fact that we are dropping less than 1% of the bomb tonnage that we used in Vietnam, despite the fact that there are extremely few actions in which enemy forces number more than a platoon etc.

There are no saturation bombings with B-52s wingtip to wingtip unloading full loads of 750 lb bombs, no free fire zones, no batallion sized combat actions, no huge firebases constantly firing H & I missions, and apparantly no eye witness reports that could possibly substantiate these sorts of numbers. How the hell did they manage to come up with these numbers?

Well, but we're also not fighting as much in jungles. A lot of urban fighting even with greater discipline is bound to be messy. The numbers probably also include insurgent deaths.

Even if they were able to pick people more or less randomly, they'd need many, many more of them to achieve an equal degree of accuracy.

The sample size is really not a problem here, though I agree that biases are more possible; however, my claim is that bias is equally likely to lead to underrepresentation of casualties if not more so. Arguably it's easier to poll those living in safer areas. To be overcounting deaths, it would imply that the sample was chosen from more dangerous areas where it is harder to get data from.

The study / poll would in effect have to establish some sort of reasonable baseline as its primary function, something I think is impossible for any group at the moment.

I think this part is easier. I assume that under Saddam, you should be able to get raw number of deaths figures for ordinary causes. If anything Saddam had an incentive to have the baseline pre-war deaths be high so that Iraq could complain about how much sanctions were killing people.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Victor Galis

Well, but we're also not fighting as much in jungles. A lot of urban fighting even with greater discipline is bound to be messy. The numbers probably also include insurgent deaths.

If they included people killed by insurgents it might be correct. But if they are saying that U.S. forces are killing at this rate then something is wrong with all the military stats compiled in the past, or this report. Urban areas are chock full of people, but they are also chock full of buildings that can stop bullets and absorb blasts and shrapnel. Once shooting starts people should be able to find cover pretty quickly. The two big exceptions to this are people who can't defend themselves (like the victims of sectarian round ups) and people who are killed instantly by roadside or car bombs (or air strikes if you like).

I've seen a fair amount of combat footage from this war and what I'm not seeing in contrast to Vietnam are a lot of un-aimed rounds being fired by Americans, even when they themselves are under fire. And to get these sorts of numbers you'd have to have a fairly large number of KIAs from artillery and air strikes, something that I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for. It seems more likely to be happening in Anbar province where reporting is light and combat relatively heavy, but that is a sparsely populated province in general and I don't know whether it could really sustain enough casualties to round out those estimates without becoming largely abandoned.

Originally posted by Victor Galis

The sample size is really not a problem here, though I agree that biases are more possible; however, my claim is that bias is equally likely to lead to underrepresentation of casualties if not more so. Arguably it's easier to poll those living in safer areas. To be overcounting deaths, it would imply that the sample was chosen from more dangerous areas where it is harder to get data from.

Distance from urban centers and regular transportation systems can be daunting for the same reasons. It might just be too dangerous to travel for a long distance anywhere in the country, even in the quieter areas if they force you to cross some dangerous areas to get to them. I imagine that Kurdistan is pretty hard to get to even though it is relatively quiet, as you have to cross so much of the rest of the country just to get there. But generally I'd agree that polling should be easier in quieter regions.

Originally posted by Victor Galis

I think this part is easier. I assume that under Saddam, you should be able to get raw number of deaths figures for ordinary causes. If anything Saddam had an incentive to have the baseline pre-war deaths be high so that Iraq could complain about how much sanctions were killing people.

But as I said earlier, Saddam's government was working without good numbers themselves with no recent census, large numbers of people in hiding and a big chunk of the country completely outside his control since the end of the Gulf War. I'm simply wondering how useful they'd be in establishing a useful model of the Iraqi pre-war population to model base your sample on.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Sikander
Once shooting starts people should be able to find cover pretty quickly.

What people should be able to do and what they can do are often very different things.

Originally posted by Sikander
I've seen a fair amount of combat footage...

... what I'm not seeing...

... I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for.

Let's see, should we trust your armchair observations, or a survey of of thousands of people who have actually experienced the carnage in Iraq. Which has the greater margin of error? Which will be closer to the truth.

[Robert]

600.000, that's like 600 per day.
Or did someone else already made that calcuation.

Anyway, the number is BS.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by CyberShy
Anyway, the number is BS.

Brilliant argument. Thanks for stopping by.